Women in Agriculture: The Backbone of Rural India’s Economy

Walk through any village in rural India at dawn and you are likely to see women already in the fields – transplanting seedlings, tending livestock, carrying fodder on their heads. Long before the rest of the household stirs, they have already begun the work that sustains the farm, feeds the family, and underpins the rural economy. Yet, their labor rarely earns them the title of “farmer.” This paradox sits at the heart of understanding women’s relationship with agriculture in India – a relationship that is vast in scale, diverse in form, and deeply undervalued in recognition.

The scale of women’s labor in Indian agriculture 🔗

The numbers are striking. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2022-23, agriculture accounts for the highest concentration of female workers in India, with 76.2% of rural women engaged in the sector. Agricultural Census 2015-16 data puts women at 73% of the rural agricultural workforce, performing nearly 70% of all farm activities. Roughly 60-80% of India’s food production can be attributed directly to the efforts of rural women.

Despite this, only about 13% of women own the land they work on. They produce most of the food and own almost none of the land – a gap that captures the structural inequity embedded in India’s agrarian system. Women in agriculture operate across a spectrum of roles: as cultivators, wage laborers, unpaid family workers, livestock managers, and increasingly as entrepreneurs. Understanding the depth of each of these roles is essential before one can begin to assess what their contributions actually mean for India’s rural economy.

Labor-intensive contributions: what women actually do on the farm 🔗

Women’s work in agriculture is overwhelmingly manual and physically demanding. Research published in the Malaya Journal of Matematik notes that most labor-intensive operations – sowing, transplanting, weeding, irrigation, fertilizer application, harvesting, threshing, and winnowing – are predominantly carried out by women. In the Indian Himalayas, studies have found that a woman works up to 3,485 hours per year on a one-hectare farm, compared to 1,212 hours for a man, underscoring just how much of the physical workload falls on women.

Beyond crop production, women are central to allied agricultural activities: livestock rearing, dairy management, poultry, horticulture, fisheries, and agro-forestry are all domains where women’s labor is dominant. Cattle feeding, milking, fodder collection, and post-harvest handling are tasks that fall almost entirely within women’s domain. Yet, because much of this work happens within the household or is classified as “unpaid family work,” it is systematically excluded from official labor counts and national income calculations.

Agricultural diversity and gender roles across regions 🔗

India’s agriculture is not monolithic – cropping patterns, seasons, and tasks vary significantly by geography, and so do women’s roles within them. According to data compiled on women in Indian agriculture, women’s participation rate reaches about 47% in tea plantations, 46.84% in cotton cultivation, 45.43% in oilseed cultivation, and 39.13% in vegetable production. In each of these, the tasks assigned to women are predominantly manual, repetitive, and low-paying, while men tend to occupy supervisory or machinery-based roles.

In states like West Bengal and Odisha, women are heavily involved in paddy transplanting – one of the most physically strenuous tasks in rice cultivation. In Punjab and Haryana, they are engaged in harvesting operations, though men control decisions around high-value crops and market access. In Karnataka, women have historically managed kitchen gardens and minor irrigation works, demonstrating a deep knowledge of soil and local ecosystems that rarely gets formally acknowledged. In the northeastern states, women play a central role in jhum (shifting) cultivation, managing crop diversity and seed preservation.

This regional variation is important because it shows that women’s agricultural work is not secondary or supplementary – it is woven into the very structure of production in each farming system. It also means that interventions or policies designed without attention to this regional diversity will fail to capture the full picture of what women contribute.

Seeds, soil, and knowledge: women as custodians of agricultural heritage 🔗

One aspect of women’s contribution that is especially undervalued is their role as knowledge keepers. Government research on women in agriculture notes that women have historically been the primary seed keepers and processors – selecting, storing, and managing seed varieties across generations. This biodiversity stewardship has ensured the resilience of local food systems, particularly in times of crop failure or climate stress.

Women in rural communities are also key conduits for agricultural knowledge-sharing at the community level. Even where literacy rates are low, women actively disseminate information on planting practices, pest management, and soil conservation among neighboring households and villages. This informal extension work is unrecognized, unpaid, and unmeasured – yet it is functionally equivalent to what agricultural extension officers are formally paid to do.

Impact of modernization: more work, less recognition 🔗

The story of modernization in Indian agriculture is often told as one of progress – better seeds, mechanized equipment, improved yields. But for women, the picture is far more complicated. Mechanization has largely confined women to traditional, low-paying tasks like weeding, winnowing, and harvesting, because most farm machinery is designed for and marketed to men. Women continue to perform these tasks manually even as men shift to machine-assisted work.

A significant study published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics found that a 10% increase in mechanized tilling led to a 5% reduction in women’s farm labor use – without any corresponding rise in their non-farm employment. In other words, mechanization did not free women from agricultural drudgery; it simply displaced them from certain tasks while creating no alternative livelihood opportunities.

At the same time, the growing phenomenon of feminisation of agriculture – driven by male out-migration to urban centers – is placing greater burdens on women. As the FAO notes, as men leave farms for better-paying non-farm work in cities, women are left to manage entire farming operations with fewer resources, less institutional support, and no additional decision-making power. The land, formally, still belongs to the men. Women take on more responsibility without gaining more authority.

Research from Karnataka found that even when men migrated away and women took over day-to-day farm management, decisions on crop choice, market sales, and resource allocation continued to be made by absent male family members. Decision-making and labor, in other words, did not shift together. Experts caution that more work for women does not automatically translate to empowerment – and in many cases, it simply deepens the double burden of agricultural labor and unpaid household work.

Women also face a serious technology and training gap. Women receive less than 20% of agricultural extension services, which means most of the training, information on new seed varieties, pest management updates, and subsidy schemes reach men – who may or may not pass this information on. Farm equipment is often not ergonomically suitable for women given differences in physical capacity and work posture, making the use of modern tools both difficult and potentially hazardous without appropriate design modifications.

Challenges in recognition: invisible labor, invisible farmers 🔗

The most persistent challenge facing women in Indian agriculture is not the work itself – it is the systematic failure to recognize that work as legitimate, skilled, or economically significant. Research published on SSRN documents that women produce approximately 80% of crops in India yet own roughly 1% of the land – a ratio that encapsulates the fundamental inequity at play.

In census classifications, women who work in family fields are often recorded as “household workers” rather than agricultural laborers, making them statistically invisible. When their work goes unrecorded, it also goes uncompensated in policy frameworks – they cannot access crop insurance, institutional credit, or government schemes that are tied to land ownership or formal farmer registration. Only 13.87% of operational land holdings in India are held by women, according to Agricultural Census 2015-16, which means the majority of women farmers simply do not exist in the bureaucratic definition of a “farmer.”

Wage discrimination compounds this invisibility. On average, women in agriculture earn only 70% of what men earn for comparable work. The work itself is frequently classified as “unskilled” even when it demands complex knowledge and physical endurance. Tea picking, cotton cultivation, oilseed farming – all labor-intensive, all heavily feminized, all categorized as low-skill and compensated accordingly.

The NITI Aayog has acknowledged these gaps and called for the mainstreaming of rural women into agricultural policy as a pathway to inclusive economic growth. Several government schemes – including the National Rural Livelihoods Mission, Deen Dayal Upadhyay Grameen Kaushalya Yojana, and the Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana – aim to formally recognize and support women farmers. India also observes October 15 as Rashtriya Mahila Kisan Diwas (National Women Farmer’s Day), a symbolic acknowledgment of how long this recognition has been overdue.

But symbolic recognition alone is insufficient. Without land rights, credit access, extension services, gender-appropriate technology, and formal registration as farmers, women will continue to carry the backbone of rural agriculture while remaining invisible to the institutions that shape it. The gap between contribution and recognition is not just a gender issue – it is an economic inefficiency. The FAO estimates that if women had equal access to productive resources as men, agricultural output in developing countries could increase by 2.5-4%, lifting millions out of hunger.

What needs to change 🔗

Closing the recognition gap requires action on multiple fronts. Land reform that enables women to inherit and own agricultural land is foundational – without it, almost every other intervention remains limited. Credit systems that do not rely solely on land collateral, extension services that actively reach women, and farm equipment designed with women’s ergonomics in mind are all necessary shifts. Digital platforms like KisanKonnect, which facilitate direct selling of produce, have shown that women farmers can increase their income significantly when intermediaries are eliminated and market access is democratized. Grassroots organizations like MAVIM in Maharashtra and self-help groups across Tamil Nadu and Kerala have demonstrated that collective action by women can shift economic outcomes – not just for individual households but for entire rural communities.

The feminisation of agriculture is already happening. The question now is whether India’s agricultural policy will catch up – whether it will treat women as the central actors they already are, rather than as secondary helpers in a system that men are formally recognized as running.

What do you think? If women already perform the majority of agricultural labor in rural India, why does policy and formal recognition continue to lag so far behind – and what would it take for that to change? And given that modernization has in many cases added to women’s agricultural burden without increasing their authority or income, can technology-driven agricultural development ever be truly inclusive without first addressing structural gender inequalities in land and credit access?

References

1. https://www.smsfoundation.org/contribution-of-women-in-agricultural-development/
2. https://www.cdpp.co.in/articles/women-as-catalysts-of-rural-economic-development–assessing-the-significance-and-impacts-on-health-and-socio-economic-status-of-women-in-agriculture
3. https://www.malayajournal.org/articles/MJMS210031.pdf
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_agriculture_in_India
5. https://ncwapps.nic.in/pdfReports/Impact%20of%20WTO%20Women%20in%20Agriculture.pdf
6. https://journalsofindia.com/feminisation-of-agriculture/
7. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajae.12315
8. https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1735159/
9. https://india.mongabay.com/2025/06/farms-turn-femme-but-women-still-plough-through-power-centres/
10. https://www.pmfias.com/feminisation-of-agriculture/
11. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4775858
12. https://www.civilsdaily.com/burning-issue-feminisation-of-agriculture-sector/
13. https://www.niti.gov.in/rural-women-key-new-indias-agrarian-revolution
14. https://www.policycircle.org/opinion/feminisation-of-agriculture-in-india/